


the next best thing to the gift of men (is a very distant second)

by Anonymous



Category: Silmaril (Glowfic), The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Gen, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 03:21:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12879120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: So he gets to know his son. He’s not much like the son he had back in Valinor. It isn’t just that he doesn’t think or talk or smile. (Reembodied Feanor would like Maedhros not to be so sad but since when does he ever get what he wants.)





	the next best thing to the gift of men (is a very distant second)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [At The End of All Things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3451040) by [lintamande](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lintamande/pseuds/lintamande). 



> I went back and forth about checking the this-is-fanfic-of-fanfic box because I'm not sure it's fair to say this is fanfic of ATEOAT, I wrote it before reading that and drew the characterization from glowfic threads like took your time with the call.
> 
> Technically it's also not based on the Silmaril Glowfic continuity. But.

There are countless losses to take stock of—the war, Beleriand, the Silmarils, even knowledge of the location of two of the Silmarils, _so much else_ —but Feanaro is with all his sons again and they are going to be fine someday somehow with enough work and enough cleverness.

Four of them are up and about already, fighting past the raw, exposed feeling and the clumsiness.

In one more day it’s six.

Canafinwe sits by Nelyafinwe while they wait, while the others scout the area and try local plants and decide where to build wherever they’ll be living for the next while.

After another day, there’s no change.

After another week, there’s no change.

(If he’d anticipated the need for ships and studied shipmaking, if he hadn’t charged Angband and died, if he’d been better prepared, if he’d been more paranoid sooner, if he’d begun by sending Nelyafinwe to negotiate for boats as soon as he realized they would need to leave, if he’d stood and fought in Formenos, if he hadn’t let the Silmarils be taken—)

At first, he thinks Nelyafinwe is making uncharacteristic choices in partitioning his thoughts. His public thoughts used to be carefully bland and unobjectionable to the sort of people who didn’t find inanity objectionable. Now what Feanaro gets from him is numb, detached despair broken up only by spikes of terror that come close enough together they don’t consistently have time to fade before the next one comes. No thoughts, no opinions, nothing else.

Feanaro catches a thought from him one morning—he wonders if he’s in Angband—but all the follow-through is private. It’s more of a relief than it should be— _that’s_ the problem, now he knows what it is, he can solve that, he can solve that _easily_ , he knows exactly what to do about it.

A couple of hours later he hears another thought—maybe it wasn’t real, maybe he didn’t kill them—and only a moment’s quiet and then—that’s too much thinking, _any_ amount is too much, he has to go back to not doing that—

Feanaro hears it and understands the implications and stops listening immediately. What he hears from Nelyafinwe is _everything_ , he isn’t keeping his thoughts private he’s just not _having_ them, he _isn’t hiding his thoughts_ , he’s not lucid enough, Turkafinwe’s met _animals_ more aware, more curious, with more interesting ideas—

(If he hadn’t made them all cope with losing their father at the same time, if he’d been there then—)

—Once they’ve settled in here and the urgent work is out of the way he’ll fix it, it’s not really an engineering problem but he’s sure there will be some angle on it that will work.

(Fire in the moonless night after the Darkening, the moment when he knew what he’d done, the absolute unshakable certainty that he could _never_ make up for all the reasons he _shouldn’t exist_ —and this is worse, Telufinwe was only dead, he’s back now, he wasn’t _erased_.)

Well, at least he’s out of Mandos.

-

He doesn’t answer when they tell him there’s food. He doesn’t move when anyone suggests maybe having a meal together.

They have to keep him away from Mandos, at least. He should stay somewhere he has people who care about him and something there for him to reach for if he ever starts to recover.

Feanaro lifts Nelyafinwe’s head and rests it in his lap—better any angle than flat, for this, if he chokes he’ll go back to the Valar whose Doom caused this in the first place. Canafinwe warned him that any touch would be unwelcome, but Nelyafinwe doesn’t react. Doesn’t stiffen up, doesn’t flinch away, doesn’t try to fight, doesn’t cooperate, doesn’t ask what’s happening, doesn’t do anything but allow himself to be manhandled.

(And suffer. The Valar are worse rulers than even he understood before he died. They knew, they saw, they allowed this, they decreed this, they pardoned Moringotto, they delayed and refused to do their jobs and wouldn’t even send a single eagle until it was properly dramatic. This outcome is acceptable to them.)

He has a few berries, not much to start with, enough to see if this works, and he takes one and holds it to Nelyafinwe’s mouth. “Can you eat?” he asks.

Nelyafinwe opens his mouth. He even chews and swallows.

“Yes, that’s correct,” says Feanaro.

He eats obediently and doesn’t ask for more or comment on the taste. But he eats.

-

Once upon a time in Valinor there was a prince, and the prince was a beautiful child who watched everyone and charmed everyone and whose parents adored him. One day, after he’d been practicing for a while, he happened to catch his father just as he was leaving the forge.

“Listen, listen! Can you hear me thinking?” he said, and his father tried to read his mind and couldn’t.

“No, you’ve successfully marked your thoughts as private. This is what I sense when I try to read you.” He sent him the impression he got and the young prince smiled and so did his father. It went without saying what a joy it was to watch him learn.

-

Feanaro checks periodically what happens when he tries to read Nelyafinwe. His emotional state doesn’t change much. Feanaro never reads him long enough to time the respite between intermittent bursts of terror, which doesn’t mean he has no information about frequency.

Terror, no thoughts. The next day: terror, no thoughts. Feanaro gets absorbed in considering whether time travel is possible and if so what materials he’ll need for the physics experiments that would let him advance the field far enough to figure out how. After a week he decides the project needs to wait until they have a lot of other things done first and abandons it to work on more immediate needs, and then he remembers he wants to know if Nelyafinwe’s in the same state he was, and reads him. Distant despair, no thoughts. The day after that, terror again, and at that moment Nelyafinwe happens to be wondering what sort of torture will happen to him next.

 _We won’t hurt you,_ he says, listening for any response. There isn’t even the echo of the concepts that would suggest Nelyafinwe so much as noticed and understood. The foreign thought slides right out of his mind and he waits quietly for whatever new pain awaits, not trying to guess—trying _not_ to guess—what and when it will be.

Feanaro thinks about how many data points he’s acquiring and what he can learn from them while he waits to see if there will be any spontaneous improvement before he’s figured out a way to fix this.

The next day Nelyafinwe doesn’t seem to have thoughts or feelings or be there at all. He’s still breathing. Feanaro listens all day, listens while gathering berries and listens while talking with Curufinwe about the math he did in his nonexistent head for thirty thousand years, listens for hours and hours until he’s sure Nelyafinwe’s not just sleeping. He’s keeping private thoughts.

It’s the first action he’s taken unprompted in thirty thousand years.

-

They establish relations with local humans. They have a lot of knowledge to share; the humans have a lot of languages to teach them, as well as knowledge of the local geographic and political situation.

“Diplomacy is your job,” Feanaro says once. “Stop wasting your time.” Nelyafinwe doesn’t even seem to hear him.

Some of the locals are curious about him; after a little internal debate the explanation they give is that he was badly injured a long time ago and his body healed but he hasn’t acted like himself since.

One of them later catches Feanaro alone, out of human earshot of any of his sons.

“Are you sure he’s better off kept alive?” the mortal asks gently.

“Yes,” he answers without doubt and without explanation. “I can fix him.”

She frowns and pauses for what is objectively a very short time but feels unreasonably long. “I hope you’re right.”

-

He stares at the sky for a long time and comes up with a map of the world as it is now. The world is spherical, it’s been set in motion around the sun and is rotating in such a way that the sun appears to go around it like it used to. The wandering stars are also in orbit around the sun. He and Curufinwe debate alternate possibilities that might explain the observed data, but settle on this as the most likely. They observe how the fixed stars seem to very slightly change relative position and calculate how far they are and then how bright and how large they are and wish for access to notes on emission spectra that they only half remember and eventually figure out what the sun is and why it glows.

They build a place suitable for elves to live in and debate ways of finding the Silmaril lost at sea. Feanaro figures out how strong gravity is and how it varies with distance and that light is affected by it and conjectures that time is also affected, but can’t progress any farther on the possibility of time travel at the moment.

Nelyafinwe lives. It turns out they don’t even need to hand-feed him; if someone puts food in easy reach and tells him to eat it he’ll grope around a little and if he finds it quickly he’ll eat. If it takes him too long he’ll give up but once they know that they’re careful to make it easy for him. It’s a much harder problem to make it as convenient for him to eliminate somewhere other than where he happens to be lying and slightly complicates leaving him somewhere more comfortable than the ground.

They talk to him. Feanaro explains difficult problems to him until suddenly they make sense—to Feanaro. Canafinwe tells him what’s happening around him and what they’re doing every time someone has to touch him. The twins both sit with him, worn down and miserable, attempting to be miserable together rather than apart. Turkafinwe tells him “hey, Nelyo” every time he comes back from one of his trips.

Morifinwe takes issue with the appearance of the stonework in the castle slowly taking shape and paints a mural over one wall. It’s a beautiful mountain range Feanaro has never seen—might be somewhere in Beleriand or nowhere at all—gleaming in Silmaril light beneath the stars.

Feanaro and six of his sons pull themselves together, and live, and cope, and are staggered and reeling but not broken.

-

Eventually, they get used to what Nelyafinwe is now. No pointed remark is going to convince him to get up. No news ever gets any reaction.

At first, when they’d all been newly alive and recently spent a while lying around too overwhelmed to do anything, it was easy to expect him to get better. After watching him remember how to keep private thoughts, it was easy to expect that kind of slow progress to continue.

Instead he stalls out and years turn to decades. It’s possible there’s improvement happening, secretly, in his mind; it’s possible he’s thinking now, and just never acts on any of his thoughts; it’s possible he understands what they’re saying now, and just never reacts in any way.

Feanaro has a very long time in which to try all possible solutions and he will eventually figure something out, but until he does, Nelyafinwe will lie there not knowing his family from Moringotto’s orcs, not knowing he ever got out of Angband, not knowing what’s happening around him, not forming guesses about the future beyond that it will contain torture, not even able to update on new evidence like the passage of years without any torture at all.

It would be interesting to know what other simple things he can do; there’s nothing magical about food that would explain reacting only to that. It might be that food is the only thing motivating enough, or the only thing that’s the right combination of motivating enough and comprehensible enough without complex thought. It might be that nothing else is easy enough to do anything about. It might be possible to experiment and try to learn things about his mental state that way. For example, will he try to move if placed on hot coals? Then the fact that he otherwise never rolls over or goes to lie somewhere else is because he’s insufficiently motivated and not because he can’t or doesn’t understand how. If offered a rock and told it’s food, will he notice it’s not when he picks it up? When he puts it in his mouth? Ever? How many times would he need to be tricked that way to stop reaching for food when it’s offered? Can he be offered food farther and farther away until it’s out of reach unless he crawls some distance for it? Will he then learn to move?

Feanaro does not perform any of these experiments.

He does ask Turkafinwe to see if his talents can be leveraged to communicate with an elf who doesn’t understand speech anymore. It doesn’t work. At this point that’s not really a surprise.

-

Feanaro has six sons who can help with building things or finding things or dealing with the humans or anything else that needs doing.

He has six sons who can hold a conversation or have an opinion or care about their surroundings.

He has six sons who know who he is.

He has six sons who are all driven, as he is driven, to the sort of work that has excellence as an accidental byproduct. He has six sons he can at least try to understand in this light. Even when the things they care about aren’t things he cares about, even when he doesn’t understand the details of what they do, he can understand by analogy what it means to them, what they’re feeling, what they want. He’s never spent years on a sonata, pouring heart and soul into it, making it as perfect as he can and then making himself better so he can make it _more_ perfect, but beautiful things have taken shape in his hands, have consumed his life. He’s never needed to stalk through the forest or run around in the wild, but when Turkafinwe has been indoors or among people too long he can remember sitting through long boring meetings with his father and can call to mind the unbearable all-over itch and know what Turkafinwe is feeling and how to do right by him.

He doesn’t know how to love someone who is not only not an inventor or a linguist, not only not interested in any technical field, but utterly void of anything that could conceivably make a person interesting. But it’s his fault Nelyafinwe’s like this, so Feanaro owes it to him to find a way anyway. And to fix him.

Feanaro has seven sons, all of them dear to him, one of them is just…

…just…

…One of them was injured in the war and isn’t well enough to get up or hold a conversation yet. That’s all. And anyway Feanaro is going to fix him, eventually _one_ of his ideas will pan out and let him approach the problem from a direction that mostly involves things he’s competent to do.

-

They do reposition him occasionally. If he’s not moved at least once a week his skin starts to break down around his hips or heels or shoulders. It’s not dangerous, not as though he were a human who could die of a disease that entered that way, but it’s nothing he should have to endure.

Curufinwe has a couple of heavy boxes of things sitting in the middle of the room where Nelyafinwe’s been for the past couple of years and someone’s propped him up against them, Feanaro sees when he walks in carrying food. He’ll have to find out who and why. And whether Nelyafinwe’s more comfortable that way, but communicating with him is not a solved problem—he won’t speak, he doesn’t give any sign of understanding when spoken to, he keeps all his thoughts and feelings private now that he remembers how, he doesn’t appear to make choices and is mostly unresponsive.

Feanaro sets a bowl of nuts beside him and tells him it’s there and happens to notice that Nelyafinwe’s eyes are open.

“Are you… awake?” he asks.

Nelyafinwe doesn’t answer. He eats the nuts one by one until the bowl is empty, reaches one more time and finds nothing, and lets his hand rest right where it happens to be when he notices there’s no more food.

-

Once there’s something there, anything at all, for Feanaro to study, he can learn _as much as it is theoretically possible to infer_ and then he’ll have a clearer idea of the parameters of the problem and then he’ll be better able to solve it and maybe it’ll go faster with more information.

So he gets to know his son. He’s not much like the son he had back in Valinor. It isn’t just that he doesn’t think or talk or smile. It’s that—Feanaro _didn’t_ wonder, but if he had, he imagines he would have imagined that Nelyafinwe stripped down to the very core of him, without goals and without guile, helpless and uncomprehending, would still notice people. That he would trail after them if they left him alone. That he would at least turn his head to look at them when they were right there trying to get his attention.

Canafinwe coaxes him, now that he’s up and paying the most minimal attention to his surroundings, into taking on some of the work of taking care of himself. It’s unclear whether the obstacles mostly involve a lack of comprehension or a lack of motivation or something else. The usual strategies for getting him to do things—ask nicely, ask curtly, whine, exist near him wanting him to do things and waiting for him to somehow magically infer that—work slowly or not at all. Eventually Canafinwe meets with some small successes, but from a mixed approach that doesn’t allow him to say with confidence what the most important components were. They therefore continue to have very little information about how the new Nelyafinwe learns, except that he does very little of it. (Maybe at some point they’ll have enough information to know whether he’s noticed the lack of torture or is still patiently, incuriously waiting for it to start.)

Once Canafinwe stops massively confounding the results, Feanaro notes what Nelyafinwe looks at and for how long. His gaze does not fall on things at random; there are things he looks at more often, and things he looks at less. He likes the mural but avoids certain parts of it. One day he watches Feanaro for a while, but it would be epistemically irresponsible to privilege the hypothesis that this is because he knows him, and not because he likes Feanaro’s new necklace that he traded with one of the locals for. It’s harder than it should be to take the necklace off and hold it out at arm’s length to test it, but that’s what he does.

Nelyafinwe’s gaze follows the necklace.

That’s information.

That’s information! He wanted information! Now he has it! He takes notes on Nelyafinwe’s behavior.

(If he wanted Nelyafinwe to acknowledge him he should have saved him, should have been alive to help him, should have had a better overall strategy, should have anticipated—)

He gets up and walks over to Nelyafinwe and sets the necklace down near him.

Nelyafinwe picks it up and holds it at arm’s length and looks at it against the backdrop of the mural. He shows no sign of any further interest in Feanaro.

He makes a note of that too.

-

Armed with detailed evidence suggesting that Nelyafinwe still has aesthetic preferences, and what those preferences are, Feanaro paints three paintings loosely inspired by parts of Morifinwe’s mural, one in the same colors with style and subject matter otherwise different, one inspired by the composition but in different colors and abstract rather than representational, and one of a mountain range loosely inspired by the Pelori looking nothing at all like the mountains in the mural. These he sets up where they’ll be equally easy for Nelyafinwe to look at. He records the results, makes further inferences about Nelyafinwe’s taste, paints something else and observes that this one quickly becomes Nelyafinwe’s new favorite.

He enlists Canafinwe’s help, considers the acoustics and carefully designs a series of tests, and finds that Nelyafinwe shows an inconsistent but more than chance preference for song over silence. Canafinwe is more than willing to sing for him most of the time.

It’s impossible to be sure he’s happy and it would be unjustified to believe he is just because that would be more pleasant. But there’s also no evidence that he’s still afraid. He hasn’t yet shown any evidence of complex thought but he has demonstrated the ability to learn, a little, slowly. He might have noticed the lack of torture. (He might not have, too.) It is probably justified at this point to consider it neither more nor less likely that he’s happy than that he’s suffering.

Other preferences are harder to elicit. Feanaro crouches in front of him and holds up two different kinds of food and Nelyafinwe just stares at him blankly.

“Which would you rather?” Feanaro asks him.

Nelyafinwe doesn’t answer. He doesn’t reach for either.

“If you want both you can just take both,” Feanaro says, just in case that’s the problem.

Nelyafinwe doesn’t move.

Eventually Feanaro just sets them both down, both just a little out of his reach, equidistant from him in different directions.

Nelyafinwe looks at both and doesn’t go for either.

Feanaro watches his son fail to demonstrate a preference and fail to pick one at random and maybe he’s not hungry but he hasn’t eaten in a couple of days so that’s not likely and this isn’t a hard problem, it’s simple, it should be easy—he hates the Valar, all of them, all fifteen of them alike, hates them all so much—

Feanaro _observes his subject’s reaction to a novel situation_. He takes notes. This is information.

It takes a little less than an hour and then Nelyafinwe gets both and sits back down to eat. There’s no way to tell if he cares that he was ever any better at making choices, or if he notices that Feanaro is disappointed or if that’s something he still cares about.

He makes a note of the results. He could replicate the experiment; he could also try variations with other pairs of foods, with two of the same food, letting Nelyafinwe go hungry for different lengths of time first, all sorts of variations—he should really replicate this experiment; all sorts of interesting results in psychology fail to replicate.

-

The second and third times, Nelyafinwe does the same as he did the first time, without first waiting an hour. Feanaro suspects it’s not a coincidence that he always goes for the one on his left first.

He tries in front and behind. Nelyafinwe does nothing for half an hour.

-

There’s a little more improvement. Not at all consistently, Nelyafinwe starts sometimes turning his head in response to sounds. Once he spends a while looking at Feanaro, and there’s no conveniently new jewelry to blame it on this time.

Once Feanaro stumbles on a strange scene: Nelyafinwe has found the pantry and is standing unmoving staring at food, while Canafinwe watches him and, humming, works on a new composition.

 _I think he’s hungry,_ Canafinwe explains. _He came in here looking for food and then froze a little while ago._

Of course. They have more than one thing and nothing is in convenient portions.

Nelyafinwe stares at food for a while longer, then wanders off without eating anything.

-

Feanaro eventually gets bored and goes back to studying _things_. He has never once made an inanimate object as heartbreaking as Nelyafinwe.

He spends a week trying to see if there are transparent materials stronger than glass that he can create with the tools he has available, but if there are, he doesn’t find one.

When he finally takes a break, he goes and sits beside Nelyafinwe and tells him about it while they enjoy the mural together. Nelyafinwe listens as well now as he ever did, probably with just as much interest and understanding as he ever had. He never was very technical. Feanaro explains that there are a number of things he’d like to figure out and then it might be feasible to travel to the bottom of the ocean and look for the Silmaril there, but that he’s a long way from being able to do that and even once he does there’s no guarantee they’ll find it—the ocean is a big place, and it might be buried, or it might have been swallowed by something.

“I used to tell you things like this before,” he says. “Of course, you used to pretend you were listening, then.” He looks over at him and finds Nelyafinwe watching him and wishes he had evidence sufficient to conclude that that’s because Nelyafinwe is anything other than totally indifferent to him. “Do you remember that?”

For a moment there’s no answer, which is fine because Feanaro’s not waiting for one, not restraining his racing thoughts to keep in sync with him. But then before he can launch into another technical monologue, Nelyafinwe says, in a flat, dead voice: “Yes.”


End file.
